Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), and The Blazing World (2014). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines[4] and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991.[5] Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on visual art but also on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. She also writes regularly about visual art. Hustvedt gave the third annual Schelling lecture on aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

She has also given talks at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and published a large volume of essays on painting: Mysteries of the Rectangle. In 2011, she delivered the annual Sigmund Freud lecture in Vienna, one of a distinguished list of speakers that includes Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Solms, and Judith Butler.

Siri Hustvedt is a scholar and intellectual who engages with fundamental questions of contemporary ethics and epistemology. In her visits to European and German universities, she has given readings from her works and contributed to the growing interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, notably in a keynote lecture and panel discussion on the relationship between the life sciences and literature at the 2012 annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Mainz. In 2013, she delivered the opening keynote address at an international conference on Søren Kierkegaard in Copenhagen on the occasion of the philosopher's two hundredth birthday.

She has published essays and papers in academic and scientific journals, including Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Clinical Neurophysiology. Her collection of essays Living, Thinking, Looking is nothing if not indicative of her broad and deep learning in several disciplines. In 2012, she received the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. The Blazing World was long-listed for the Booker Prize, and she recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo.

Siri Hustvedt's works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, an interdisciplinary account of her own seizure disorder, Hustvedt states her need to view her symptom not "through a single window" but "from all angles."[6] These multiple perspectives do not resolve themselves into a single view but rather create an atmosphere of ambiguity and flux. Hustvedt presents the reader with characters whose minds are inseparable from their bodies and their environments and whose sense of self is situated on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. Her characters often suffer traumatic events that disrupt the rhythms of their lives and lead to disorientation and a discontinuity of their identities. Hustvedt's concern with embodied identity manifests itself in her investigation of gender roles and interpersonal relations. Both her fiction and nonfiction highlight dynamics of the gaze and questions of ethical representation in the visual arts.

A section of The Blindfold was made into a movie by the French filmmaker Claude Miller.[7] The film La Chambre des Magiciennes won The International Critics Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.[8]What I Loved was on the initial short list for the Prix Femina Étranger in France for best foreign book of the year. It was also short-listed for Waterstone's Literary Fiction Award in England and the Barcelona Bookseller's Award in Spain. It won the Prix des libraires du Quebec in Canada for best book of 2003.[9]The Summer Without Men was also shortlisted for The Femina Prize in 2011.[10]

The Blazing World was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.[11]

In 2015, Hustvedt was appointed as lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical School of Cornell University.

Siri Hustvedt is the 2012 recipient of the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities.[12]

In 2014, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oslo.[13] She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Université Stendhal-Grenoble, France, on October 20, 2015 and from Gutenberg University-Mainz, Germany, on June 16, 2016.

Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?, bilingual edition English-German, published as part of a series of the annual Schelling Lectures delivered at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich; Deutscher Kunst Verlag, 2010

The Eight Voyages of Sinbad, published in Spanish Ocho Viajes Con Simbad with photographs by Reza. Madrid: La Fabrica, 2011. French edition by Actes Sud, 2011

Reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1990. Ed. Richard Ford. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1990. 105-126. Also reprinted in The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nighta. Eds. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996. 20-48.

"Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few" (on expert culture). Philoctetes: The Journal of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination, vol.1 2007. Reprinted in Salmagundi, no. 166-167; Spring Summer 2010.

"Reflections on a More or Less Hidden Being." Contemporary Psychoanalysis 46: Special Issue on Psychoanalysis and the Media (2010): 224-234.

Guest lecturer at the New York Studio School: 2000, 2003, and 2007.[citation needed]

"When the Protaganist [sic] is a Psychoanalyst: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and Literature" Fifth Annual Lecture, The Friends of the Newman Library, Baruch College with the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health Library Advisory Committee. November 4, 2005.[citation needed]

"The Drama of Perception: Looking at Morandi." Sunday Lectures at the Met. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. September 21, 2008.[citation needed]

Conversation with psychoanalyst Beverley Zabriskie about Jung's Red Book. The Red Book Dialogues. The Rubin Museum of Art. New York City, October 26, 2009.[citation needed]

"Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?" The Third Annual Schelling Lecture. Academie der Bildenen Künste (The Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich, Germany. January 27, 2010.[citation needed]

Conversation with the Harvard neuroscientist Hans Breiter. Brain Wave series at Rubin Museum of Art. March 10, 2010.[citation needed]

Inaugural lecture in series: Neuro Culture: Body and Brain in Cultural Perspective. CUNY Graduate Center for the Study of Women and Society. New York City, September 28, 2010.[citation needed]

"Three Emotional Stories", a lecture given at Pain, Poetry and Perception: A Symposium on the Convergence of Neuroscience, Literature, and Psychoanalysis at Georgetown University. Jointly sponsored by The Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis and the Department of Psychiatry Georgetown University Hospital. (With Joseph LeDoux and Michael Jasnow) Georgetown University. October 30, 2010.[citation needed]

"I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I was Blind." Keynote lecture for Réunion d'Hiver de la Societé de Neurophysiologie Clinique de Langue Française: Neurophysiologie de L'hystérie. Paris, January 21, 2012.[citation needed]

"Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms and the Truths of Fiction." Keynote Lecture at International Kierkegaard Conference at Ceremonial Hall, the University of Copenhagen, May 6, 2013.[citation needed]

"Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?" The Third Annual Schelling Lecture. Academie der Bildenen Künste, Munich. January 27, 2010.[16]

Alise Jameson. "Pleasure and Peril: Dynamic Forces of Power and Desire in Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold," Studies in the Novel, vol. 42, issue 4 (2010).

Christian Knirsch, "In a Time Warp: The Issue of Chronology in Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold," Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 11 (2010): (no pagenation).

Christian Knirsch, "The Story of a Migraineur: Black Holes in Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold

Elizabeth Kovac, "Violated Securities: Symptoms of a Post 9/11 Zeitgeist in Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American,' in eTransfers: A Postgraduate ejournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, issue 2 (2012).

Caroline Rosenthal, "The Inadequacy of Symbolic Surfaces: Urban Space, Art and Corporeality in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved," in ed. Caroline Rosenthal, New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism Explorations of the Urban (Rochester, N.Y: Camden House, 2011), 73-122.

Henderikus J. Stam, "The Neurosciences and the Search for a Unified Psychology: The Science and Aesthetics of a Single Framework," Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015):1467.

Hubert Zapf, "Narrative, Ethics, and Post Modern Art in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved," in Astrid Erll, Hubert Grabes and Ansgar Nunning, eds., Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media (Berlin: de Gruyter), 171-196.

Gianna Zocco."The Art of Watching: The Literary Motif of the Window and its Potential for Meta Fiction in Contemporary Literature, Trans revue de literature generals et compare, 16 (2013).

Zapf, Hubert. "Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved." In Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media, edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes and Angsar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008, 171–94.

Zapf, Hubert. "Trauma, Narrative and Ethics in Recent American Fiction." Other People's Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, edited by Martin Modlinger and Phillip Sonntag. Berlin: Peter Lang AG, 2011.